Kemi Badenoch launched the Conservatives' annual conference in Birmingham with a new effort to reconnect with traditional supporters. She promised to get the state out of the way of business. Paul Harrison said, "the 'red wall' strategy as a defining way of making policy is over," marking a major shift.
Kemi Badenoch has launched the Conservatives' annual conference with a new effort to reconnect the party with its traditional supporters in business and affluent Britain, as she sought to put her stamp on a "new" party.
The party leader promised to get the state out of the way of business and pitched policies at wealthier sections of the electorate, saying it was "morally right" to look at cuts to inheritance tax and vowing to scrap a £100,000 childcare cliff edge for working parents.
Andrew Griffith, her shadow chancellor, will on Monday promise "the most ambitious deregulation project in a generation", vowing to cut the cost of housebuilding, scrap environmental bodies and back plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport.
Paul Harrison, Downing Street press secretary under Theresa May, said there had been a distinct shift away from Boris Johnson's strategy of targeting policy relentlessly at former Labour strongholds.
"As they try to turn the page on the legacy of over a decade in government, the 'red wall' strategy as a defining way of making policy is over," he said.
Badenoch admitted in an interview with the FT last week that the Conservatives had become "complacent" in thinking that business leaders would always stick with the party. The 2016 Brexit vote heralded a decade-long fracturing of that relationship.
Badenoch's comments on inheritance tax -- paid by only about 5 per cent of estates -- and help for parents earning more than £100,000 appeared aimed at swaths of southern England, which ditched the Tories for the Liberal Democrats at the last election.
However, such efforts may be hindered by her opposition to closer ties with the EU, her robust stance on "culture war" issues and her refusal to allow any Tory candidate to stand if they back the 2050 net zero target or the European Human Rights Convention.
The Tory leader set out her vision in a 100-page pamphlet called The Right Way, which harked back to The Right Approach, a blueprint for government published by the Tories 50 years ago under Margaret Thatcher.
In her opening remarks to her conference in Birmingham, Badenoch drew attention to "so many things I saw going wrong" while she served in the last Tory government.
The Birmingham conference is being built around the leader, who is more popular than her party, according to polls. "The party will be doing what I want to do, because it's my Conservative Party now," she told the FT.
In her pamphlet, Badenoch criticises Prime Minister Andy Burnham for what she claims is a statist view of the economy. She wrote: "Government doesn't create growth. People do. Business does."
Griffith, in his speech to the conference on Monday, will claim that the Tories will cut red tape, including environmental rules, to cut the cost of a new home by £50,000.
"No one else is coming to save our economy," he will say.
Griffith will also set out the central tenet of Badenoch's economic message: big cuts to welfare spending to facilitate tax cuts and deficit reduction.
Badenoch needs the Tory conference to go well: her party is languishing at about 20 per cent and third place in the polls and is often crowded out of the political conversation by Burnham and Nigel Farage's Reform UK.